


vision of mary in converse shoes

by unrulyangels



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Families of Choice, Gen, Languages and Linguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrulyangels/pseuds/unrulyangels
Summary: Ray realizes, of course, that the boys in Julie’s band speak a passable English, but he downloads a copy ofGet Started in Swedishthe night of the big Eats & Beats disaster anyway. There’s nothing quite like being spoken to in your native language, after all; todos saben eso.(Or: Five times Ray spoke Swedish to no one, and the one time someone spoke it back.)
Relationships: Ray Molina & Reggie Peters
Comments: 54
Kudos: 210
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	vision of mary in converse shoes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gray Shadows (tris_chandler)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tris_chandler/gifts).



> I so hope you like this, Gray Shadows, and hope, also, that you won't mind Alex's and Luke's absences from the fic _too_ much. (I'd meant to write them in, initially, but my-brain.exe saw your "I am especially interested in Ray and Reggie" and--apparently--just stopped working, ha.)
> 
> Note: if you're reading this on a desktop or laptop computer, English translations for the Swedish phrases--appraised and improved by the lovely [Ciuro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ciuro)!--will crop up if/when you hover over the (foreign language) text with your mouse.
> 
> (Title from The Weepies' "Old Coyote.")

Ray realizes, of course, that the boys in Julie’s band speak a passable English, but he downloads a copy of _Get Started in Swedish_ the night of the big Eats & Beats disaster anyway. There’s nothing quite like being spoken to in your native language, after all; todos saben eso.

“Being seen isn’t really their thing,” Julie’d said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other outside of their house, but Ray doesn’t buy her pronouncement: there is no way that the three boys she’d performed with at the café are shy. They might live in Stockholm--Julie’d said the city’s name with a funny look on her face when he’d asked her for it--but Ray figures that he’ll be stumbling across an ear-splitting group Zoom call any day now.

“Hej,” he reads off his laptop screen in preparation for this day: “Hur mår du?”

The house is silent around him, Carlos and Julie already in their respective beds, but Ray fantasizes that there is a smoky figure curled up in the armchair to his left. “Jag mår bra, tack,” he imagines this figure saying in response.

“Ah, crap,” he mutters in the armchair’s direction after a beat. “I’m conversing with the furniture.” He sets the laptop aside. Stands up, stretches. “God natt,” he says to the apparition in the armchair, his mouth curved into a wry grin.

He huffs out a laugh, as he crosses the armchair on his way to the staircase: its seat cushion is creased, as though someone really has been sitting there all this time. “God natt,” he repeats, shaking his head.

#

Ray does not sleep well that night, or the night after that. “You’ve ruined things for Julie,” he mutters to himself, shoving his covers aside. “You’ve completely wrecked things for your princesa, cabrón.”

He steals down the stairs quietly, careful not to wake Carlos or Julie, and then turns toward the kitchen. It is--to Ray’s bewilderment--empty but well-lit: its lights are all on, and his laptop is on, too, the sixth chapter of _Get Started in Swedish_ splayed across its screen.

“Carlito,” Ray groans, before turning toward the fridge. He rummages through the freezer, pushing at a box of ground turkey patties before pulling a container of ice-cream out and hunching against the kitchen island with it and a spoon. He sticks a spoonful of ice-cream in his mouth and thinks: I am glad that Carlos and Julie are asleep right now; I am glad that they do not have to see me like this.

“Gud bevare oss,” he reads off the screen, his voice hitching at the last word. He sets the spoon aside, presses his palms to his eyes. He sits there, in this wretched, woeful position, for what feels like five years. When he finally removes his hands from his eyes, he heaves a sigh--and then blinks.

There is a large mug sat in front of him, a mug he cannot remember getting out of the cupboard. YOU’RE THE WORLD’S BEST DAD, it informs him in big, colorful letters. Carlos’d given it to him for his birthday last year, Ray remembers. His eyes had been shining, bright as stars.

It is this memory that makes him lurch away from the island. He can do this, he thinks, nodding to himself. He can fix things for Julie: he’ll call Flynn tomorrow, ask her to help him out--help him throw some sort of party, maybe.

He is halfway up the stairs, debating the merits of streamers with himself, when he remembers the container of ice-cream. He treks back down the stairs and into the kitchen and then pauses. Blinks again. The container is gone; the spoon is in the sink.

He rubs at the corners of his eyes, then shrugs. “Okay,” he says, a little helplessly, to God or Rosa or the universe or whoever. “Tack.”

#

His kid’s magic, Ray thinks, as he watches Julie shine from behind his camera lens. She has always been brilliant, Julie has, but here and now, performing with these Swedish kids, she’s absolutely electric.

He watches her sing to the bassist, a kid in a leather jacket and ripped jeans, and he feels as though his heart is about to explode right out of his chest--she is so beautiful, and she looks so much like her mother.

He glances from Julie to the bassist absent-mindedly and realizes, with a jolt, that the boy is looking straight at him, a strange intensity to his eyes. Ray does not know what to make of his stare, or what to make of all the black clothing, but when the kid realizes that Ray is looking back at him, he beams and then bounces on his toes, a little, like a puppy. Angels, Ray thinks again, looking at the drummer and the guitarist before looking back at the bassist.

“Gud välsigne dig!” he mouths at the boy. He is much too far away from the kid for him to understand Ray, but the kid’s lips curve into a sweet smile all the same.

#

Ray, sprawled across the sofa in the living room, grins as snatches of Julie’s voice drift downstairs. “I’m playing the Orpheum, Flynn,” his daughter crows over the phone. “Can you believe it?”

Ray can hardly believe it himself. Julie and her bandmates--Alex, Luke, and Reggie, he’s learned--are incredible, but Julie's only fifteen and the most impressive thing that Ray himself had accomplished at that age was winning second place--and twenty-five whole dollars--in a student photography contest.

“Vad häftigt!” he murmurs to the empty room. It does not respond, of course, but then, he wasn’t expecting it to, and its silence is pleasant, besides--until it is not.

He does not know how it happens: one minute, the living room feels light, open, and sunny, and the next, it feels as though there is a kind of heaviness to its air, a certain sense of melancholy. Please, not today, Ray--who is accustomed to sudden swells of unhappiness--thinks. Not right now.

“Allt kommer att ordna sig,” he says in a low voice. “Todo estará bien.”

It takes a couple of minutes, but Ray feels the wave of grief recede; steal back out of the room. Gracias a Dios, he thinks earnestly, observing, absent-mindedly, that the seat cushion of the armchair to his left is creased once again.

#

Later that night, stood next to an excited Carlos and exuberant Victoria inside of the Orpheum, Ray is struck, once again, by the realisation that his kid is pure magic.

“Whatever happens, even if I’m the last standing,” Julie and her phantoms are promising the crowd, as their instruments taper off, “I’mma stand tall, I’mma stand tall,” and Ray thinks, Right, exactly. Julie--Julie is incredible, resilient and strong in a way that absolutely bowls Ray over. (He should never have doubted her: there is nothing that could ever hold Julie Molina down permanently; absolutely nothing.)

Gazing up at Julie on the stage now, Ray wonders, vaguely, what his face must look like to others, and laughs when he realizes that it must look like the boys’. They are all three of them looking at Julie like she is the sun, the cheering, clapping audience an--evident, obvious--afterthought.

He considers the boys themselves--Reggie to Julie’s left and Luke and Alex to her right, gripping one-another’s hands tightly--and feels a sudden surge of affection course over his body. He wishes, suddenly, that he could shake their hands after the show, or pull each of them into bear-hugs. They have brought so much love back into Julie’s life--and into his as well, by extension.

“Tack ska du ha,” he shouts at them as they bend into bows, ignoring the half-bemused, half-bewildered look on Victoria’s face.

Ray does not expect any of the boys to hear him over the crowd’s clamor, but he’d almost swear that Reggie turns to look at him right before he vanishes--and that he mouths something back.

#

The morning after the band’s performance at the Orpheum, Ray--still keyed up--wakes early. Carlos and Julie are both still asleep and likely won’t wake for hours, but Ray figures that he’ll get an early start on breakfast anyway; get some waffle batter ready.

He shuffles down the stairs and into the kitchen, humming the opening bars of “Stand Tall” under his breath, when he suddenly grinds to a halt, the song abruptly dying on his tongue. His kids are asleep, but there is a kid--Reggie, he realizes a little belatedly--sat at his island, flipping through the pages of a hefty textbook.

“Oh, morning, Ray,” Reggie says, glancing up from his textbook to grin at Ray before glancing back down again, as though this is just another morning to him. “I found this copy of Ylva Olausson’s _Swedish Tutor_ on sale at the Barnes & Noble by Julie’s high school. I made her buy it for me the other day, or for you, rather, but don’t worry, I’ll pay her back--somehow. I would’ve just stolen it, but Luke gave us this long speech about the sanctity of books and how stealing a book’s not like stealing a painting or a pair of shoes.” Ray--who is half-convinced that he is still dreaming--just blinks as Reggie adds, conspiratorially, “Playing the book club circuit back in 1995 had a huge effect on him, you see.”

Ray does not know what to make of the remark about 1995, or of the boys’ apparently cavalier attitudes toward theft--Is this a language barrier thing? he wonders. Or a Swedish thing, maybe?--or even of Reggie’s presence in his kitchen, so he pushes all of his questions to one side and just says, “You boys played book clubs?”

“So many book clubs,” Reggie nods sagely before paling. “Wait,” he whispers, staring up at Ray. “You can hear me?”

Ray squints at him, thrown. “Of course I can--,” he starts replying, stopping abruptly when Reggie knocks his palm against a boning knife that someone has left on the island. “Mierda,” Ray says, darting across the kitchen and seizing the boy’s hand. “Are you alright?”

“Never better,” Reggie says a little weakly, still staring at Ray. “Seriously,” he adds, pulling his hand out of Ray’s, “I’m sort of unbreakable--Alex threw a box cutter at me the other day and it went right through my stomach.”

Ray just shakes his head, as though to shake away Reggie’s inane remarks. “You’re bleeding,” he says instead, guiding the boy toward the sink and washing his cut out with soap and water.

He keeps quiet because Reggie does, too, watching his blood mix with the water on its way down the drain with a strange, indecipherable expression on his face. When he reaches for the box of _Teen Titans_ Band-Aids--Julie’s choice--by the sink, though, and Reggie looks at him again, embarrassed and pale and trembling all at once, Ray knows that he has to say something. His head is full of questions, but the one that flies out of his mouth surprises both of them: “Kan jag krama dig, Reggie?”

Reggie stares at him, still as a statue, and Ray has to wonder if what he has just asked Reggie might be considered odd by Swedish standards--or even by American ones--when the kid throws his arms around Ray’s neck. “Jag skulle tycka om det,” he says, his mouth moving against the fabric of Ray’s T-shirt. “Väldigt mycket. You have no idea.”

The words are a little muffled, and Ray is better at reading Swedish than he is at listening to it, but he thinks that he gets the gist of the first half of Reggie’s response anyway. “I have some idea,” he corrects gently, remembering the looks on both Julie’s and Reggie’s faces last night, before hugging the kid back, hard as he can. Reggie’s hair smells like coconut and orange blossoms, a bit like the shampoo that Rosa'd liked best and left in all of their bathrooms, Ray notes, wrinkling his nose in mystification, but he is distracted by the sound of Reggie’s breath hitching in his chest--and his bewilderment dissipates before he can pay it any real mind.

**Author's Note:**

> ♡


End file.
